The Seventh Plague

by James Rollins

  At least, that was the plan.

  She also had Tagak and Joseph standing guard, watching the mountaintops for any sign of hunters from the station. Like everyone traveling in the Arctic, they carried rifles.

  Safia moaned, thrashing her limbs under the blankets. Kat had found a digital thermometer in the first-aid kit and checked her fever: 103.4. High but not deadly. Still, to protect her brain, Kat kept swapping out compresses soaked in ice water, which she sent Rory out to freshen periodically. She kept one under Safia’s neck and another on her forehead.

  The cold did seem to calm her, and she had not had another seizure after the first one. Since then, Safia had been fading into and out of consciousness, sometimes recognizing them, other times not.

  She mumbled in a fever dream.

  Rory shifted closer, cocking his head. “I think she’s speaking early Egyptian Coptic.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not one hundred percent. And it might make no difference. Dr. al-Maaz is an expert on Egyptian history and knows the Coptic language well. She may be just drudging up words out of her feverish consciousness.”

  Kat looked at him. “But you don’t think that’s the explanation.”

  “When my father got sick—and the others—they reported vivid hallucinations.”

  “Which is common with high fevers and encephalitis.”

  “Yes, but it was how similar their deliriums were. All about Egypt, burning sands, diseases.”

  “Your father and his men could have been responding to the heat and their fear of this disease. The similarities could have been nothing more than the power of suggestion, triggering a mass delusion.”

  “You could be right. In the end, some of the hallucinations never even fit this pattern.”

  “Then there you go.”

  Rory sighed. “My father’s gotten into my head.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had long talks via the Internet. He had his own theory. He thought it was possible the organism could record the memory pattern of a person it infected and carry it forward to the next victim, replaying it by stimulating the second brain in the same manner.”

  “Why would it do that? What’s the evolutionary advantage?”

  “He believed only strong memories would be captured and recorded, especially something frightening, which would excite the brain more fully, feeding the microbe. Then by carrying it forward and repeating the pattern in the next victim—”

  “—it would quickly energize that new feeding ground.” Kat nodded her head. “Intriguing, but where does that get us?”

  “According to my father, it takes us all the way back to the biblical plagues.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He believed the strain of microbe that infected him, that infected Safia, the same strain he spread to Cairo and beyond, all came from the time the organism first bloomed in the Nile, turning it red. He thought it might have captured that period of panic and horror, and now repeats it over and over again, an echo out of the distant past.”

  “After so long?”

  “It may not be long for this organism. Simon Hartnell tested the microbe and found it’s nearly immortal, capable of going into dormancy until it gets its next electrical fix.” Rory finally shrugged. “Like I said, it was just something my father dwelled upon. And with Safia speaking ancient Egyptian, it reminded me of that conversation.”

  Kat considered this theory. Human memories were organized in the hippocampus region, but recent research suggested the information was only stored there on a short-term basis. Later, the hippocampus recoded these memories as electrical patterns across billions of synapses and distributed them for long-term storage over the entire cerebral cortex.

  She also remembered Dr. Kano mentioning the unique shapeshifting biology of the Archaea domain, how these species were capable of chaining together into wires or cables. Could a web of interconnected microbes capture the brain’s pattern, especially if it was cast by a strong enough memory, and mimic it later?

  Safia stirred, her lips moving silently in some dream.

  Kat felt a chill, picturing what she had just imagined happening in her brain.

  Rory shifted closer and whispered in Safia’s ear, “Khére, nim pe pu-ran?”

  Kat frowned. “What did you say?”

  He glanced over. “I asked what her name was, using ancient Coptic.”

  “But why—?”

  Safia answered faintly, as if speaking from a deep well. “Sabah pe pa-ran . . . Sabah.”

  Rory jolted at this response, pushing away, his face scared.

  “What?”

  He looked to the laptop sitting atop a folded fur, then back to Safia. “She said her name is Sabah.”

  “Why is that significant?”

  “Before all hell broke loose, Safia learned the name of the woman mummified on the throne, the one who infected her. Her name was Sabah.”

  Kat wanted to dismiss this again as the power of suggestion. If Safia had been working on his puzzle, her feverish mind could have latched on to this.

  Still . . .

  She stared at Rory. “How did you know her name?”

  “From the tattoos found on her body.”

  She thought for a moment, then pulled out the data disk she had removed from Safia’s pocket. She shoved it at Rory and pointed it to the laptop. “See what else you can figure out.”

  She refused to leave any stone unturned.

  He eagerly took the disk and sat cross-legged before the computer.

  She returned her attention to Safia, willing the woman to fight. She checked her temperature again, freshened the compresses, and managed to get her to swallow another aspirin along with a few sips of water.

  Rory tapped away behind her, mumbling, sounding sometimes frustrated, sometimes astounded. She let him concentrate on his work.

  A voice rose from outside the tent flap. “Hello.” It was Joseph, the oldest of the Inuit trio. “Someone comes. Many lights sweeping down into the valley from the mountains.”

  Kat stood, grabbing her gun.

  Seems it’s time for me to go to work, too.

  3:58 P.M.

  Sabah pe pa-ran . . .

  She walks for the thousandth time through the burning sands, past the carcasses of water buffaloes, through the crushed bodies of birds of every feather, where even the vultures have fallen where they fed.

  Screams rise from the village to her left, weeping, mourning.

  Still, she continues to the blood-red river. Crocodiles float leadenly past, bellies to the sun. The reeds are choked with the dried husks of frogs. And everywhere clouds of flies rise and fall, like the waves of the sea beyond the delta.

  Other images swim, overlaying this one.

  —a woman holds a dying baby boy to her chest.

  It is my child.

  —a young girl gasps for air as her body burns.

  I am that girl.

  —a bent-backed hag is stoned for blaspheming the gods.

  I feel those rocks break my skull.

  On and on.

  She is a hundred women, tracing back to that time of misery. She is Sabah and all others who carried that memory. It is what they were all trained for, to be the hemet netjer . . . the maid of God. They learned to take the water and let it wash through them, to hold down their own fears so they did not taint the memory of the time of misery, to preserve it for the next woman in line, to never forget.

  To carry the memory is a curse.

  To know what we know, a blessing.

  And now I am another.

  She reaches the muddy bank and stares yet again at where the world ends in a wall of darkness far beyond the river. The storm eats the sun and is not satisfied. Lightning crackles, and hail pounds the sands like the hooves of a thousand angry stallions. She knows it is both the past and what might yet come.

  She speaks to the new woman.

  You must warn them.

  4:05 P.
M.

  “Conditions remain within the baseline for an optimal test firing,” Dr. Kapoor informed Simon.

  The pair stood at the helm of the control station with a panoramic view through the curved window to his tower. Over the past half hour, his emotions alternated between fury and elation.

  He could not fathom how Painter Crowe suddenly appeared aboard the cargo plane. It was like the bastard was the living embodiment of his name and flew up there on his own. Now the aircraft was contaminated and in the process of being locked down. Unfortunately half the crates of Pestis fulmen still remained aboard the plane, but despite the sabotage, nine had made it safely out.

  He stared down at the map of the ionosphere. Small blips marked where the balloons had discharged their loads at the lower edges of that charged layer of the atmosphere. Digital estimates of the energized streams from the geomagnetic storm swirled and eddied in waves across his screen.

  Kapoor nodded to where he was looking. “Projections remain good, even without the additional load. Still, we should give our seeds time to settle into this pool.” He pointed to a spot on the screen where energy whirled tightly. “I’ve already calibrated the beam to this site. But we don’t want to wait too long and allow the ionosphere’s currents to spread the seed too thin.”

  “What’s your estimate for firing?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Very good.”

  Simon rose up and down on his toes with excitement.

  Ten more minutes and Tesla’s dream will finally be realized—along with my own.

  A phone chimed at his station. He picked it up and heard rasps of static. He knew who had been patched to his private line.

  “Anton?”

  “We’ve found them, sir.”

  “And the data?”

  “It will be secure in the next ten minutes.”

  He smiled at the serendipity of the timing.

  Perfect.

  “You have your orders,” he said.

  “And the women?”

  He stared at another screen that showed the circling aircraft. Painter Crowe was no longer a problem, only a loose end. He saw no need to retain a bargaining chip.

  “Clean your mess up.”

  “Understood.”

  Simon clutched his hands behind his back in an attempt to reel in his excitement. He paced back and forth. He looked at his board.

  All green lights.

  After what seemed like forever, Kapoor returned.

  “Well?” Simon asked, as the man seemed to hesitate.

  The physicist grinned and pointed to the key inserted into his console. “We’re go for ignition.”

  Simon felt this moment needed some momentous words, a grand speech about changing the world, but he let his actions do his speaking. He stepped to the console, gripped the key, and turned it.

  He felt the vibration of power in his fingers as systems engaged—or maybe it was his own exhilaration.

  At last . . .

  Faces across the station swung toward the view.

  “Look at the top of the tower,” Kapoor said.

  He drew his gaze upward. Copper rings began to revolve, dragging with them the massive electromagnets. Within that metal nest, an egg of superconductors shelled in titanium slowly turned, its tip pointed down.

  “Amazing,” Kapoor whispered.

  Over the course of a minute, the rings whipped faster, the magnets becoming a blur. The egg spun like a perfectly balanced top, rising weightless within its cocoon of energy—then slowly it began to tip, rolling its narrow end toward the dark sky.

  Simon took a breathless step forward, drawing Kapoor with him.

  Once the egg’s axis pointed to the heavens, Simon let out his breath.

  With a blast that sounded like the world cracking, a shaft of pure plasma shot from the tower. Cheers and whistles rose throughout the control station, everyone knowing this was the first step to saving the planet. Blue crackles of energy burst from the tip of the tower and coursed out to the spiral array, dancing among the limbs of that steel forest. It reminded Simon of Saint Elmo’s fire, a natural fiery display that had once shot along the masts of sailing ships plying uncharted seas.

  Only this journey explored an ocean far more mysterious.

  The column of plasma struck the clouds, driving them apart. Lightning shattered outward along the belly of the clouds, trying to dispel the energy. The beam continued toward the heavens—where it finally struck its intended target.

  It smashed into the ionosphere, slamming into the shield he had cast overhead, a barrier made of the smallest bits of life. The energy spread outward, visible as an aurora of such brilliance that Simon had to shy from it.

  Kapoor passed him a set of tinted goggles.

  He held them to his eyes, too excited to strap them on. More and more energy rocketed from the tower to the sky, charging the aurora even further. Waves of energy cascaded outward in all directions.

  “You’ve done it,” Kapoor said, turning his gaze to the board. “It’s holding stable.”

  Simon smiled.

  At long last . . .

  4:21 P.M.

  Something was dreadfully wrong.

  Painter stood near the open rear hatch of the Globemaster, one fist wrapped in a scrap of weather balloon. Outside, a column of fire blazed through the storm and shattered across the roof of the world. Fed by this energy, the aurora spread outward in all directions, outshining even the arctic sun.

  He felt the charge across his skin as the microbes soaking his clothes responded to the energy in the air. A glance back to the dark hold showed the crimson pools from the bullet-riddled container shimmered with a soft glow.

  As he watched, one of those pools spilled into a river flowing toward him, toward the open door. He yelled to those gathered behind a translucent tarp hastily erected between the cargo hold and the front quarter of the aircraft.

  “Keep the plane’s nose down!”

  He didn’t want this poisonous soup pouring from the plane. He suspected some might have already dribbled out the back, before order was restored. He pictured the plane painting a red circle over the top of the clouds, seeding the storm below as readily as it had the skies above.

  After the catastrophe aboard the plane, he had been quarantined away from the rest of the crew. He was the only one drenched by the damaged container, which still lay on its side, slowly leaking with each rock of the aircraft. Painter had no doubt he would have been shot outright, except the others needed a maintenance crew and no one was willing to venture into this toxic swamp.

  So it was up to him to do something about the rear hatch, which was stuck open, its works gummed up from the weather balloon it tried to chew up. Aurora Station refused to let them land until the issue was rectified. The station did not want a rough landing to send the remaining load of crates scattering across the tundra or over the base.

  Which meant for now, the crew needed him.

  While down deep the others must know they were breathing an airborne pathogen, he let them clutch to whatever false hope they wanted.

  It’s keeping me alive.

  A loud boom shook the ship, accompanied by a blinding flash. He had been aboard enough airplanes to recognize what had happened.

  Lightning strike.

  He turned back to the open skies. As he feared, matters were beginning to change outside. The aurora borealis filled the bowl of the sky. It was no longer shimmering waves, gently lapping at the arch of the world. It had become a raging tempest, roiling and surging.

  Sharper crackles popped earthward.

  He knew the effect he was witnessing. It was called upper-atmospheric lightning, but in reality, it was streams of luminous plasma being cast off the ionosphere. It presented in various ways, each with a cute name—sprites, blue jets, and elves. But in fact, the displays were large-scale electrical discharges.

  But Painter knew nothing this large had ever been recorded.

  A dozen glowing
sprite halos bloomed in the air, then burst into crimson balls of flame, trailing tendrils of energy toward the clouds, while brilliant blue cones of gas spun across the skies.

  The storm below wasn’t happy about any of this and spat up forks of lightning, strafing the skies, which only added to the dance of fire between the heavens and the clouds.

  Painter knew even a medium-sized storm contained the potential energy of a hundred Hiroshimas, and the sprawling arctic beast below could easily hold ten times that.

  As he watched the interplay, he realized he was witnessing a feedback loop between the ionosphere and the storm, each exciting the other, escalating faster and stronger.

  The station below must have realized the same. The column of plasma blasting from the tower to the sky suddenly extinguished.

  But it was too late.

  Simon Hartwell had managed the impossible.

  He lit the skies on fire.

  25

  June 3, 8:05 P.M. CAT

  Akagera National Park, Rwanda

  “No one move,” Gray warned.

  Only his helmet lamp was still on. Its beam shone past where Noah crouched over the lion cub after shocking the cat to a splashing stop. The others were spread out behind him.

  Their commotion in getting here had sent ripples through the drowned forest, shimmering the reflection of the starscape ahead, enhancing its prismatic effect. The spread of tiny glows and glimmers failed to truly illuminate the shadowy bower under the dense canopy. In fact, the opposite was true. The phosphorescent dabs and luminous whorls made the dark spaces darker. And the longer one looked, the more those brighter bits burned into the retina, creating false glows as one’s eyes searched the forest, doubling and tripling the trickery.

  Still, Gray swore entire sections of paint shifted across the forest, as if tiny snatches of a larger canvas suddenly came to life. The faint murmurs he had heard when they’d arrived had gone silent. The entire flooded jungle had gone dead quiet.

  “What’s out there?” Noah whispered.

  Roho rumbled, slipping from his master’s side. The cub stalked forward, moving with great care, his legs barely stirring the water. He slunk his belly low, tail swishing just over the surface.